As with my more than somewhat amateurish acting, so is it with my equally amateurish political writing. There comes a time, ghastly and embarrassing though it is, when one is forced to acknowledge that the 'pros' do it all so much better than the 'ams'.
Today, in The Telegraph, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard sums up his judgment and his feelings over the EU referendum. The essence of his (and my) argument is contained in the opening line of the title to his article:
Brexit vote is about the supremacy of Parliament and nothing else
With superlative skill he rolls out both his arguments and his doubts and I reproduce his entire essay because he tells it so very much better than I could ever do:
"With sadness and tortured by doubts, I will cast my vote as an ordinary citizen for withdrawal from the European Union.
Let there be no illusion about the trauma of Brexit. Anybody who claims that Britain can lightly disengage after 43 years enmeshed in EU affairs is a charlatan, or a dreamer, or has little contact with the realities of global finance and geopolitics.
Stripped of distractions, it comes down to an elemental choice: whether to restore the full self-government of this nation, or to continue living under a higher supranational regime, ruled by a European Council that we do not elect in any meaningful sense, and that the British people can never remove, even when it persists in error.
For some of us - and we do not take our cue from the Leave campaign - it has nothing to do with payments into the EU budget. Whatever the sum, it is economically trivial, worth unfettered access to a giant market.
We are deciding whether to be guided by a Commission with quasi-executive powers that operates more like the priesthood of the 13th Century papacy than a modern civil service; and whether to submit to a European Court (ECJ) that claims sweeping supremacy, with no right of appeal.
It is whether you think the nation states of Europe are the only authentic fora of democracy, be it in this country, or Sweden, or the Netherlands, or France - where Nicholas Sarkozy has launched his presidential bid with an invocation of King Clovis and 1,500 years of Frankish unity.
My Europhile Greek friend Yanis Varoufakis and I both agree on one central point, that today's EU is a deformed halfway house that nobody ever wanted. His solution is a great leap forward towards a United States of Europe with a genuine parliament holding an elected president to account. Though even he doubts his dream. "There is a virtue in heroic failure," he said.
I do not think this is remotely possible, or would be desirable if it were, but it is not on offer anyway. Six years into the eurozone crisis there is no a flicker of fiscal union: no eurobonds, no Hamiltonian redemption fund, no pooling of debt, and no budget transfers. The banking union belies its name. Germany and the creditor states have dug in their heels.
Where we concur is that the EU as constructed is not only corrosive but ultimately dangerous, and that is the phase we have now reached as governing authority of crumbles across Europe.
The Project bleeds the lifeblood of the national institutions, but fails to replace them with anything lovable or legitimate at a European level. It draws away charisma, and destroys it. This is how democracies die.
"They are slowly drained of what makes them democratic, by a gradual process of internal decay and mounting indifference, until one suddenly notices that they have become something different, like the republican constitutions of Athens or Rome or the Italian city-states of the Renaissance," says Lord Sumption of our Supreme Court.
It is a quarter century since I co-wrote the leader for this newspaper on the Maastricht summit. We warned that Europe's elites were embarking on a reckless experiment, piling Mount Pelion upon Mount Ossa with a vandal's disregard for the cohesion of their ancient polities. We reluctantly supported John Major's strategy of compromise, hoping that later events would "check the extremists and put the EC on a sane and realistic path."
This did not happen, as Europe's Donald Tusk confessed two weeks ago, rebuking the elites for seeking a “utopia without nation states" and over-reaching on every front. “Obsessed with the idea of instant and total integration, we failed to notice that the citizens of Europe do not share our Euro-enthusiasm,” he said.
If there were more Tusks at the helm, one might still give the EU Project the benefit of the doubt. Hard experience - and five years at the coal face in Brussels - tells me others would seize triumphantly on a British decision to remain, deeming it submission from fear. They would pocket the vote. Besides, too much has happened that cannot be forgiven.
The EU crossed a fatal line when it smuggled through Lisbon Treaty, by executive cabal, after the text had already been rejected by French and Dutch voters in its earlier guise. It is one thing to advance the Project by stealth and the Monnet method, it is another to call a plebiscite and then to override the outcome.
Need I remind readers that our own government gave a "cast iron guarantee" to hold a referendum, but retreated claiming that Lisbon was tidying up exercise? It was no such thing. As we warned then, it created a European supreme court with jurisdiction over all areas of EU policy, with a legally-binding Charter of Fundamental Rights that opens the door to anything.
Need I add too that Britain's opt-out from the Charter under Protocol 30 - described as "absolutely clear" by Tony Blair on the floor of the Commons - has since been swept aside by the ECJ.
It is heartening that our judges have begun to resist Europe's imperial court, threatening to defy any decision that clashes with the Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights, or the core texts of our inherited constitution. But this raises as many questions as it answers.
Nobody has ever been held to account for the design faults and hubris of the euro, or for the monetary and fiscal contraction that turned recession into depression, and led to levels of youth unemployment across a large arc of Europe that nobody would have thought possible or tolerable in a modern civilized society. The only people ever blamed are the victims.
There has been no truth and reconciliation commission for the greatest economic crime of modern times. We do not know who exactly was responsible for anything because power was exercised through a shadowy interplay of elites in Berlin, Frankfurt, Brussels, and Paris, and still is. Everything is deniable. All slips through the crack of oversight.
Nor have those in charge learned the lessons of EMU failure. The burden of adjustment still falls on South, without offsetting expansion in the North. It is a formula for deflation and hysteresis. That way lies yet another Lost Decade.
Has there ever been a proper airing of how the elected leaders of Greece and Italy were forced out of power and replaced by EU technocrats, perhaps not by coups d'etat in a strict legal sense but certainly by skulduggery? On what authority did the European Central Bank write secret letters to the leaders of Spain and Italy in 2011 ordering detailed changes to labour and social law, and fiscal policy, holding a gun to their head on bond purchases?
What is so striking about these episodes is not that EU officials took such drastic decisions in the white heat of crisis, but that it was allowed to pass so easily. The EU's missionary press corps turned a blind eye. The European Parliament closed ranks, the reflex of a nomenklatura.
While you could say that the euro is nothing to do with us, it obviously goes to the character of the EU: how it exercises power, and how far it will go in extremis.
You can certainly argue from realpolitik that monetary union is so flawed it will lurch from crisis to crisis until it ruptures, in the next global downturn or the one after that, and will therefore compel the European elites to abandon their grand plans, so why not bide our time. But this to rely on conjecture.
You can equally argue that the high watermark of EU integration has passed: the Project is in irreversible decay. We are a long way from the triumphalism of the millennium, when the EU was replicating the structures of the US federal government, with an EU intelligence cell and military staff in Brussels led by nine generals, and plans for a Euro-army of 100,000 troops, 400 aircraft and 100 ships to project global power.
You can argue too that the accession of thirteen new countries since 2004 - mostly from Eastern Europe - has changed the chemistry of the EU beyond recognition, making it ever less plausible to think of a centralized, close-knit, political union. Yet retreat is not the declared position of the Five Presidents' Report, the chief blueprint for where they want the EU Project to go. Far from it.
In any case, even if we do not go forward, we may not go backwards either. By design is almost impossible by to repeal the 170,000 pages of the Acquis. Jean Monnet constructed the EU in such way that conquered ground can never be ceded back, as if were the battleground of Verdun.
We are trapped in a 'bad equilibrium', leaving us in permanent friction with Brussels. It is like walking forever with a stone in your shoe.
But if we opt to leave, let us not delude ourselves. Personally, I think the economics of Brexit are neutral, and possibly a net plus over twenty years if executed with skill. But it is nothing more than an anthropological guess, just as the Treasury is guessing with its cherry-picked variables.
We are compelled to make our choice at a treacherous moment, when our current account deficit has reached 7pc of GDP, the worst in peace-time since records began in 1772 under George III. We require constant inflows of foreign capital to keep the game going, and are therefore vulnerable to a sterling crisis if foreigners lose confidence.
I am willing to take the calculated risk that our floating currency would act as a benign shock absorber - as devaluation did in 1931, 1992, and 2008 - but it could be a very rough ride. As Standard & Poor's warned this week, debts of UK-based entities coming due over the next twelve months amount to 755pc of external receipts, the highest of 131 rated sovereign states. Does it matter? We may find out.
The Leave campaign has offered no convincing plan for our future trading ties or the viability of the City. It has ruled out a fall-back to the European Economic Area, the "Norwegian" model that would preserve - if secured - access to the EU customs union and preserve the "passporting" rights of the City.
The EEA would be a temporary haven while we sorted out our global trading ties, the first step of a gradual extraction. The Leavers have not embraced this safe exit - or rather, less dangerous exit - because it would mean abandoning all else that they have pledged so promiscuously, chiefly the instant control of EU migrant flows.
By this fourberie they have muddied the water, conflating constitutional issues and with the politics of immigration. We risk a Parliamentary crisis and shrieks of betrayal if the Commons - discerning the national will - imposes the EEA option on a post-Brexit government, as it may have to do.
We leave Ireland in the lurch, at risk of an economic shock that it did nothing to provoke. Those Leavers who chatter cavalierly of resiling from the (non-EU) European Convention of Human Rights should be aware that the Good Friday peace accords are anchored in that document, and if they do not understand why it matters that just 12pc of Ulster Catholics support Brexit, they are not listening to Sinn Fein.
However unfair it may seem, the whole Western world deems Brexit to be an act of strategic vandalism at a time when Pax Americana is cracking and the liberal democracies are under civilizational threat.
Without rehearsing well-known risks, we have a Jihadi cauldron across much of the Levant and North Africa; Vladimir Putin's Russia has ripped up the post-War rule book and is testing Nato every day in the Baltics; China's construction of airfields along international shipping routes off the Philippines is leading to a superpower showdown with the US.
The Leave camp was caught off guard when Barack Obama swept into London to make it the US view brutally clear, followed by Japan's Shinzo Abe, and troop of world leaders. You do not unpick the web of interlocking global ties lightly.
One hopes that Brexiteers now understand what they face, and therefore what they must do to uphold British credibility if they win. We must be an even better ally. But by the same token, the people of this country have every right to take this one chance to issue their verdict on four decades of EU conduct.
To those American friends who ask why we cavil at compromises with Europe when we "pool sovereignty" - an inaccurate term - with scores of bodies from NATO to the United Nations, the answer is that the EU is not remotely comparable in scale, ideology, or intent to anything else on this planet.
Remainers invoke Edmund Burke and the doctrine of settled practice, but settled is the one thing the EU has not been in its irrepressible itch for treaties and its accretion of power, and Burke is a double-edged sword.
He backed the American Revolution, not to create something dangerously daring and new but rather to restore lost liberties and self-government, the settled practice of an earlier age. Americans of all people should understand why a nation may wish to assert its independence.
This is my decision. It may go against my own interest, since I hope to live out part of my remaining years in France - though countless Britons lived there contentedly in 19th Century before we ever had such a thing as the European Union, and no doubt will continue to do so long after it is gone.
I urge nobody to follow my example. It ill behoves anyone over 50 to exhort an outcome too vehemently. Let the youth decide. It is they who must live with consequences."
The only disagreement I have with A E-P is his final paragraph. Us 'oldies' have a duty to exhort - and vehemently too! This is our last chance to escape a coming catastrophe.
VOTE LEAVE
The comments under this article
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/eu-referendum-brexit-could-threaten-western-political-civilisation-european-council-president-donald-a7079461.html
are an indication as to just how little the little people care about the wellbeing of the EU political class.
Après nous le déluge....... bring it on
Posted by: david morris | Monday, 13 June 2016 at 13:51
Thanks, David, not just one but several buckets of ice-cold water poured over the EU racket.
Posted by: David Duff | Monday, 13 June 2016 at 14:05
"He backed the American Revolution, not to create something dangerously daring and new but rather to restore lost liberties and self-government, the settled practice of an earlier age. Americans of all people should understand why a nation may wish to assert its independence."
Damn Right.
Posted by: Whitewall | Monday, 13 June 2016 at 14:25
Dead right Duffers us old farts got us into this mess and we should bloody well be ashamed of ourselves for being so duped. The Great British worker has had his nose put out of joint by champagne socialists and greedy financiallsts. Time for him to change his mind and vote against the status quo.
Posted by: Peter Whale | Monday, 13 June 2016 at 17:15
Well, not this particular old fart, Peter, I voted 'NO' back then!
Posted by: David Duff | Monday, 13 June 2016 at 17:29
What AEP doesn't mention is that on past performance HMG sovereignty will likely be worse than the HMG / EU combined sovereignty we have now, and maybe even worse than EU authority on it's own.
"Put not thy trust in Princes".
SoD
Posted by: Loz | Tuesday, 14 June 2016 at 08:59
The point you keep avoiding, SoD, is that all of us have to "put our trust in princes", there's no avoiding the obnoxious bastards!
But at least now we have the chance to choose whether those 'princes' are Brits or Europeans. I grant that Cameron and his immediate predecessors are more or less rubbish but, dammit, they're British rubbish and **most important of all** we get the chance to choose them or loose them!
At the moment, the 'princes' who rule you are:
Jean-Claude Juncker
Donald Tusk
Jeroen Dijsselbloem
Mario Draghi
Martin Schulz
Which one did you vote for? Thought so, none of them, and neither do you have a chance to sack any of them, either! And even if you could, it's the 'Kaiserin' who pulls their strings!
Just remember, the essence of the matter is simple:
"Brexit vote is about the supremacy of Parliament and nothing else"
Posted by: David Duff | Tuesday, 14 June 2016 at 09:21
I love the comments under that Indie article.
Also of interest was yesterday's Telegraph letters page, in which every single letter absolutely destroyed Cameron for the absurd threats he's been making against pensioners. I looked for the usual balancing letter they like to print from the opposite point of view, but there wasn't one - clearly nobody had written in support.
I start to hope that we might manage to do this; they'll overturn it, of course, and we'll be sent back to vote again (and again and again until we get it right), but how good to deliver a punch in the face to the loathsome political class.
Posted by: Andrew Duffin | Tuesday, 14 June 2016 at 10:19
SoD - as Duffers said I think we can all agree that Cameron is a useless, socialistic lying twat, as were is three predecessors.
However before that we have had a record of producing some half decent national leaders especially when they were most needed (or else just after they were most needed)
THe reason for that is obvious - there was genuine accountability and a genuine political contest.
As more and more power has leached to Brussels, and to the NWO (AKA the UN) national governments are less and less accountable and there is no longer a meaningful political process.
And indeed you have the same process in the USA where more and more power has (despite the constitution) been stolen by the centre, accelerating under Obama and as a result the quality of government has declined vertiginously, largely because there is more of it.
Brexit is not some sort of a panacea. But it is a vital enabling step on the road to reclaiming our heritage as free men
Posted by: Cuffleyburgers | Tuesday, 14 June 2016 at 13:06
Hi Duffers I accepted responsibility for the EU because I voted for the traitor Heath and the "back to basics" lying toerag Major and like you I voted against joining the "Common Market" why would we join anything common.
Posted by: Peter Whale | Tuesday, 14 June 2016 at 13:17
Quite so, Peter, true blue gentlemen like us wouldn't be seen dead in anything 'common'!
Posted by: David Duff | Tuesday, 14 June 2016 at 14:20
"However before that we have had a record of producing some half decent national leaders especially when they were most needed (or else just after they were most needed)"
So these'll be the guys and gals that took us from hero-to-zero in the 20th century post-WW2, so that by 1974 we were being bailed out by the IMF and begging to join the EU for some fiscal and monetary discipline?
SoD
Posted by: Lawrence Duff | Tuesday, 14 June 2016 at 14:37
No Sod, not them, as you know perfectly well.
Now stop being provocative and go to your room and do your homework.
Posted by: Cuffleyburgers | Tuesday, 14 June 2016 at 16:59
I wish y'all the best. Our common liberties outrank any "common market" by several orders of magnitude. As embarrassing as Trump is, he MIGHT possibly set us on that same good road to restoring those liberties, even if he doesn't understand them or what they are supposed to do. Breath held and fingers crossed for both of us.
Posted by: Michael Adams | Tuesday, 14 June 2016 at 23:02
http://eveningharold.com/2016/06/07/wombles-to-lose-wimbledon-common-access-under-brexit/
You might have to rethink if this sort of thing is going to happen.
Posted by: Andra | Wednesday, 15 June 2016 at 03:15